“The act of keeping the secret a secret has almost become bigger than the secret itself.”

This adage is at the heart of Renée Knight's blockbuster first novel, DISCLAIMER. Catherine Ravenscroft is a successful documentary filmmaker who is married with one son. Her life looks perfect on the outside, but "something" happens to change things dramatically. This family just moved into a new house, so it was not particularly strange for Catherine to find a book she does not recognize on her nightstand. It is an odd-looking book and triggers no memory for her as ever buying it. She decides to read it out of curiosity but ignores the fact that "the disclaimer ('any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead...') is ominously crossed out in red."

"As a first novel, and a plot-driven one at that, DISCLAIMER hits all the high spots of a thriller. Perhaps readers don't get a moldering body, but they certainly get a great deal of suspense."

The old cliché about curiosity killing the cat is not far off the mark as Catherine moves into the story. The book is about her --- about a hideous experience that happened 20 years ago that she thinks she has succeeded in keeping secret from the world. Obviously, at least one other person is aware of the riddle and lets Catherine know that he or she has gotten into the house to leave the book. What else could this person have done? The reader quickly realizes that the parallel storyline reveals the intruder to be a man. He is a former teacher and a bitter widower who has lost his son in a tragic accident. He makes it a habit of wearing his dead wife's sweater because it makes him feel close to her.

As the novel unfolds, different perspectives and relationships begin to emerge. The man who is haunting Catherine is Stephen Brigstocke. His goal in life since his wife’s passing is to exact revenge on Catherine for the death of his son. She is totally bewildered by the book's appearance in her life and is slowly cracking under the pressure of remembering the secret and trying to keep it. Brigstocke has no pity; he is relentless in his pursuit of his prey.

In GONE GIRL, the husband and wife have diametrically opposed points of view, as do the wives and husbands in DISCLAIMER. For example, Brigstocke's role is to tell his story in the first person. Can readers believe anything he says? Can they even trust that he actually had a wife named Nancy who is dead? And what of the sweater? Would a sane man parade around in a scrungy sweater that was supposed to belong to his late wife? When Catherine finally sees his house, she thinks it looks "like the phlegmy growl of a homeless drunk on Charing Cross Road."

One of the most serious mysteries that hangs over the plot is the identity of the real writer who wrote the "book within a book." As a first novel, and a plot-driven one at that, DISCLAIMER hits all the high spots of a thriller. Perhaps readers don't get a moldering body, but they certainly get a great deal of suspense. As Knight parses out the various events that the characters act out, readers will be glued to the pages of this book, which just might be the runaway hit of the summer.